Justice Insider: No action-movie scenes at COTA building

Downtown workers were warned last week that if they saw Mission: Impossible-style maneuvers at Broad and High streets to pay them no mind.

Jeb Phillips, The Columbus Dispatch

Downtown workers were warned last week that if they saw Mission: Impossible-style maneuvers at Broad and High streets to pay them no mind.

The Columbus police SWAT team was conducting an exercise at 33 N. High St., according to emails circulating in Downtown office buildings. The drill could include lots of sirens, flashing lights and police helicopters with officers rappelling from them, according to one of the emails.

Anyone looking for action was disappointed.

The police drill took place inside the Central Ohio Transit Authority’s William J. Lhota Building on Wednesday, said Marty Stutz, a COTA spokesman. Police had approached COTA because they wanted to run a scenario in an office building with about 10 floors, he said.

There were no flashing lights and certainly no hovering helicopters disgorging rappelling police ninjas. In fact, Stutz said, customers could buy bus passes on the first floor without realizing anything was going on.

Police did put out an advisory about the exercise, Sgt. Rich Weiner said, but the more-sensational warnings were spread on social media.

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Good fences make good neighbors. So does cleaning up your dog’s poop.

A Reynoldsburg woman called police late last month, saying she had come home from work to find a large pile of dog feces in her yard. She said she wanted to file charges against the people next door, who had allowed their dogs to poop in her yard off and on since April.

She said she had been picking up the mess in plastic bags and depositing it on her neighbor’s back deck. Her husband had talked to the neighbor as well.

The woman told police she planned to install a fence to keep the dogs out. The officer suggested that, in the meantime, she stop depositing the poop on the neighbor’s deck.

The officer talked to the neighbor and pointed out that a leash attached to a tree was long enough to allow a dog to poop over the property line. The neighbor admitted that one of the dogs probably was the offender.

The officer suggested “check(ing) the property boundary area for dog waste and clean(ing) it up to maintain neighborly relations.”

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A weird electronic glitch in U.S. District Judge Algenon L. Marbley’s courtroom last week left spectators wondering whether the court was showing its support for breast-cancer awareness.

As Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Brown gave his opening statement in a fraud case, each document he displayed on a computer screen was pink — the same shade that has come to represent the fight against breast cancer. Jurors saw pink W-2 forms, pink bank-loan paperwork and pink tax returns.

“I can deal with pink,” Brown said, hoping to move along. Finally, Marbley intervened to check on the jury’s reaction. One juror admitted he was having trouble reading the pastel documents, so Brown went old-school and displayed the items — now white — with an overhead projector.

His team said later that the pink paperwork apparently was caused by a computer plug that had gone askew. Once the plug was jiggled, the correct color palette was restored.